The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.
I have been speculating about what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.
The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.
May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?
Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, about the origin of life; one might as well think about the origin of matter.
Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.
I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything.
Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
Till facts be grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see the bearing of scattered facts.
I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.
If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.
Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.